Any MMO that lets me jump up, grab a ledge, and then hang there like I’m attempting a pull-up in gym class is an MMO that I can get behind.

As our DDO group neared level 8 — actually holding ourselves back from taking the level until everyone was ready — we infiltrated House K and did a trio of quick quests last Sunday evening. Not everyone in our group has all of the content, so we have to work around that and pick missions that all six of us have unlocked.

As we waited to form, I played around with the cosmetic pets in my inventory. While I’m usually a big pet person in MMOs, I haven’t fiddled with them muchly in DDO. Once you collect a pet, it sticks around on a character sheet tab, along with its various “tricks.” These are basically pet emotes, and DDO smartly decided to sell additional tricks to pet owners.

I don’t know where I got it, but the above flying cat is easily one of the freakiest things I’ve ever seen. I already am not much of a cat fan, but add big fleshy wings to it and you’ve got some Syp nightmare fuel.

After a false start that involved one of our numbers insta-dying to a champion mob, we made good progress through the dungeons. Lots and lots of traps in the first one, which is where our halfling Zens comes into play. We tease him that we’re going to tie a rope to his waist and toss him over the traps and then drag his corpse back if he’s unsuccessful.

Hey! There’s an innocent-looking chest in the middle of this room, surrounded by bones and a corpse! Totally fine to touch, right? Should run right up to it. What could go wrong?

While our group wisely avoided the chest, my dumb dog Goober decided to take a shortcut through the middle of the room and trigger bars and some nasty mobs. He ended up costing us the chest in the end, and you know how that blame gets shifted — from the pet to the pet owner. Sorry, guys!

Other than the samey-ness of these early DDO dungeon designs, there wasn’t much noteworthy about these runs. Very straight-forward, and I enjoyed one piece of gear upgrade to my kit.

It did make me think that I should be playing my Artificer again and resume her solo journeys through content yet unexplored. I think I’ll make that one of my December goals.

2 thoughts on “DDO: Flying cats and other monstrosities”

It.s good to run as many house K and Coin Lords quests as you can, at least until you unlock the extra bank and inventory tabs. I run the group of quests that start with NPCs in the bar of house K three times on every character (normal -> hard -.> elite) since I don’t sub and it’s very easy house K rep.